Diana's Nightmare - The Family

The Family

Kindle edition published by Christopher Hutchins Ltd 2011

Copyright © Chris Hutchins and Peter Thompson, 1993

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.

The rights of Chris Hutchins and Peter Thompson to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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Prologue — THE LAST CHANCE SALON

PART I — THE NIGHTMARE

Chapter One — Angel In Exile

Chapter Two — Devil In Disguise

Chapter Three — The Camilla Conspiracy

Chapter Four — Engaging The Enemy

Chapter Five — Kensington Pallas

Chapter Six — Living Dangerously

Chapter Seven — The Maxwell Connection

Chapter Eight — Sex, Lives & Audiotape

Chapter Nine — The Squidgy Syndrome

PART II — THE FAMILY

Chapter Ten — Crown of Thorns

Chapter Eleven — The Prince & The Showgirl

Chapter Twelve — The Bowes Lyoness

Chapter Thirteen — The Agony Aunt

Chapter Fourteen — Fergie's Revenge

Chapter Fifteen — Relative Destiny

Chapter Sixteen — Edward The Caresser

Chapter Seventeen — Supper At Tiffany's

Chapter Eighteen — Diana's Secret Lover

'The royals don't want the fairy-tale anymore'

Andrew Morton

LAUGHING in the rain, a soaking wet Diana, Princess of Wales, sheltered from a downpour at her sons' school sports day as a new star took her place in the royal firmament. Though she had no wish to usurp Diana's place, the Honourable Serena Alleyne Stanhope found herself being presented to the public from the balcony of Buckingham Palace as very much one of the Family. Her presence between the Queen and the Queen Mother in the traditional line-up after Trooping the Colour on Saturday, 12 June, 1993, owed as much to the plummeting ratings of the House of Windsor as to her engagement to Her Majesty's nephew, Viscount Linley.

The Windsors had run decidedly short on glamour following Diana's acrimonious separation from Prince Charles the previous December and the earlier exodus of Sarah, Duchess of York, in a flurry of scandal. Considering the voices noisily raised against her family, the Queen needed every vote-catcher she could muster. Like the seasoned campaigner she was, she had eagerly seized upon the forthcoming union of the Armani public relations girl and Princess Margaret's carpenter son to win a few popularity points.

In themselves, the couple presented a paradox typical of Britain's contradictory class system. For one was the daughter of a viscount, though still a commoner, and the other, though the son of a commoner, was a viscount who stood twelfth in line to the throne. Only the Windsors, however, rated as real royals and their position was threatened as never before.

Serena, a twenty-two-year-old ash blonde, might not have possessed Diana's magnetic attraction for the cameras which were recording the occasion, nor Sarah's extrovert charm which had enlivened proceedings in the past, but she symbolized a positive start in a new direction. The young heiress was a welcome addition to royal ranks and she accepted the compliment as modestly as she could. Noted for her sweet, friendly nature and her preference for casual dressing, it was just possible that the aptly named newcomer might bring a touch of serenity to Europe's most troubled royal household. Newly slim and neat in a navy designer suit, she looked up from under the broad brim of a straw hat swathed in matching blue material. 'Half a duvet,' someone had unkindly called the generous trimming.

Overhead in the leaden skies, RAF jets zoomed past in a salute to their sovereign on the official date of her sixty-seventh birthday. In one of them was Sarah Kennedy, who was broadcasting live to listeners of the BBC's Radio Two. 'It's like that quote from Gilbert & Sullivan, "Everybody's somebody when nobody is anybody,"' opined Ms Kennedy, a self-confessed republican, after her jet had landed. 'The royals have lost the mystique and they'll never get it back. I don't want to get rid of them, although at times I wanted that balcony to disintegrate.'

David Linley stood just behind his bride-to-be, smiling wryly at the events which had suddenly propelled him to the forefront of royal life. His days as one of the country's most highly eligible young men might be numbered, but he could be proud of the fact that he was fulfilling a role which had cruelly eluded his princely cousins. Among the Queen's children, only Princess Anne, who had remarried after her divorce, had managed to restore order to her private life and, although she had chosen to spend this gloomy day elsewhere, the Queen knew she could count on her total support. Her three sons were an entirely different story. Not one had managed to find a wife suited to the peculiarities of royal life.

Although the Windsors' right to rule is enshrined in an Act of Parliament, the law could be changed to alter the line of succession. Twice in its history, Parliament has removed monarchs who have displeased it, one of them ending his reign on the scaffold. Only a handful of rabid republicans seriously want to remove the Queen, but quite a few people seem anxious to deny Prince Charles his birthright.

Charles, the Windsor heir who had taken a mistress during his marriage, was a seriously worried man as he stood next to his father, the Duke of Edinburgh. He appeared neither comfortable in his ceremonial rig nor in himself. Resting his hands on the parapet, he surveyed the scene across the Palace forecourt and down the long leafy boulevard known as the Mall. Beyond the gilded bronze figure of Victory atop the marble pedestal of the Victoria Memorial, the glass and steel tower blocks of the City of London rose mockingly on the horizon.

Everything he cherished and despised about the kingdom, the worthy old and the tacky new, was directly in his line of vision. But Charles's comments on the failings of the world had counted for little since his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles had become public. He had been exposed as an adulterer in a six-minute taped telephone call and the consequences were horrible.

After a millennium of monarchy, Charles had desperately wanted to take the Crown into the twenty-first century - to boldly go where no other king had gone before. Many thought he was struggling in this objective even before the latest electronic devices known to mankind had exposed one of its oldest vices. Once Camillagate and Squidgy had entered the language of Shakespeare and Milton, the prospect of divorce represented a personal disaster for an heir more errant than apparent.

The British sovereign is not only head of state, the judiciary, the armed forces and the Commonwealth, but also head of the Church of England. As a divorced man, it would be impossible for Charles to become Defender of the Faith, leading a church which, while accepting the ordination of women priests, still forbids divorce. The Coronation Oath would have to be changed solely for his benefit and some senior clerics seriously questioned the wisdom of such an irrevocable step.

If his thoughts weren't on Camilla at that moment, reminders of her were all around him. The stone balcony on which he was standing had been constructed by her family as part of the Palace's new East Wing 143 years ago. The Caen stone that Camilla's forebear, the builder Thomas Cubitt, had chosen for the work, had begun to crumble soon afterwards and the balustrade, dressed for this ceremonial occasion in burgundy-and-gold velvet, had been replaced with more durable Portland stone. Some wondered just how durable the House of Windsor itself might be now that Diana was no longer its star performer.

So few royals were present this overcast summer's day that the ribbed columns of the Palace showed between gaps in the line-up. There was no Prince Andrew, who had been helping his estranged wife with her emotional problems since her disgrace at St Tropez. No Prince Edward, still a bachelor by choice, who was aboard the QE2 for a luncheon celebrating the fortieth anniversary of his mother's coronation. No William or Harry of Wales, who were enjoying a picnic hamper between showers with Diana at Ludgrove School near Wokingham in Berkshire. No Beatrice or Eugenie of York. No Master Peter Phillips or his sister Miss Zara Phillips.

All six of the Queen's grandchildren were missing from the celebrations marking her official birthday. On this showing, it seemed that the Windsors might have reached the end of the lineage. But anyone who believed that the monarchy was about to fall, and some were even taking bets on it, had drastically underestimated the Queen. Her Majesty had recently made some fiercely contested concessions towards paying income tax on her private wealth and, as a further gesture to public opinion, she had dropped members of her family from the Civil List. Republican sympathisers who scanned the line-up looking for fresh scalps were to be sadly disappointed. Serena Stanhope, for one, could afford to pay her own way in any company. She stood to inherit millions from the estate of her grandfather, the Earl of Harrington, who had wisely removed himself to the Republic of Ireland, where tax rates were far more reasonable.

In just twelve months, the Windsors had succeeded in bringing more grief to loyalists than in any comparable period since Edward VIII had stepped aside fifty-seven years ago. Most deplorably, its critics claimed, it had failed in its fundamental obligation to uphold traditional family values. The monarchy, wrote Sir Antony Jay, scriptwriter of the 1992 BBC documentary
Elizabeth R,
'can set a consistent moral standard which people can look to as a guide and example.' He added: 'Even when some members of the Royal Family do not behave as well as people expect them to, they are still contributing to the process of reviewing and revising the nation's behaviour patterns.'

This interpretation provided ample scope for rewriting the rules in a society which had been firmly instructed before 1992 - the Queen's
annus horribilis
- that royal proclivities towards adultery and other high jinks were just figments of a lurid tabloid imagination. The Press, particularly the tabloids, had been proved right time and again despite the robust denials of Buckingham Palace.

Diana's nightmare in the royal world was just one symptom of a far-reaching malaise affecting the Windsors. Her decline and fall from grace in the eyes of the Family had, perversely, consolidated her place in the hearts and minds of ordinary people. They had watched her royal progress and sympathised as though she was one of their own.

'It was terrifying,' Diana the archetypal girl-next-door had said, referring to her wedding at St Paul's Cathedral on 29 July, 1981.

'Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be,' she had ventured a little later when the tiara began to slip.

In 1993, Diana the Defiant was openly talking about the agonies of women locked into loveless marriages and enslaved by addictive illnesses.

Laughing in the rain that gloomy Saturday was one of the joys of her new freedom outside the Family.

AT 10.15 on a Monday morning two weeks later, the clouds had cleared and bright sunlight spilled down on a lone figure walking along Drummond Street in a cosmopolitan neighbourhood near Euston Station. He was tall and fit, broad shoulders clad in a white T-shirt and long, tanned legs stretching from a patterned pair of shorts down to the unfashionable pavement. He was carrying a bottle of milk for the tea he liked to drink as he worked. He looked straight ahead, no longer fearful of the tap on the shoulder or the prying eyes of the security forces. Opposite Joe's Cafe, the man, younger in appearance than his forty years and thoughtfully bespectacled, entered a door beneath the blue canopy of the Haandi Tandoori Restaurant and climbed the carpeted stairs to his well-equipped office.

Only the blue lettering on the T-shirt gave any outward sign that his life had changed perceptibly. The wording read:
Recently at the Regent Beverly Wilshire.
($395 per night for a deluxe room.) Andrew Morton, scourge of the royals and a very New Money millionaire, was about to start work at his one-man operation known as Palace Press.

Morton's biography,
DIANA: Her True Story
- written, most people believed, with the Princess's co-operation - had sold five million copies in twenty languages since its publication exactly a year earlier. The book had alerted the world to the hopeless state of the Waleses' marriage, to Diana's bulimia and her supposedly suicidal cries for help, and to Charles's friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Ever since, it had been the catalyst for a lot more besides. Its publication had probably been the lowest point of the
annus horribilis
, both a milestone in royal reporting and a millstone around royal necks.

'It's a phenomenon,' said Andrew Morton, serving tea on a circular pine table in his office. 'I no longer consider myself as the author. It has a life of its own. I have scratched the surface and got some way in, probably a bit further than other people. But nonetheless there is still a lot there - it's a mine shaft with many unexplored corridors.'